and, had advised the brethren to be
very careful in examining preachers before accepting them. The people
and "every several Congregation" have a right to elect their minister,
and, if they do not do so in six weeks, the Superintendent (a migratory
official, in some ways superior to the clergy, but subject to periodical
"trial" by the Assembly, who very soon became extinct), with his council,
presents a man who is to be examined by persons of sound judgment, and
next by the ministers and elders of the Kirk. Nobody is to be "violently
intrused" on any congregation. Nothing is said about an university
training; moral character is closely scrutinised. On the admission of a
new minister, some other ministers should preach "touching the obedience
which the Kirk owe to their ministers. . . . The people should be
exhorted to reverence and honour their chosen ministers as the servants
and ambassadors of the Lord Jesus, obeying the commandments which they
speak from God's mouth and Book, even as they would obey God himself. . . . "
{182}

The practical result of this claim on the part of the preachers to
implicit obedience was more than a century of turmoil, civil war,
revolution, and reaction. The ministers constantly preached political
sermons, and the State--the King and his advisers--was perpetually
arraigned by them. To "reject" them, "and despise their ministry and
exhortation" (as when Catholics were not put to death on their instance),
was to "reject and despise" our Lord! If accused of libel, or treasonous
libel, or "leasing making," in their sermons, they demanded to be judged
by their brethren. Their brethren acquitting them, where was there any
other judicature? These pretensions, with the right to inflict
excommunication (in later practice to be followed by actual outlawry),
were made, we saw, when there were not a dozen "true ministers" in the
nascent Kirk, and, of course, the claims became more exorbitant when
"true ministers" were reckoned by hundreds. No State could submit to
such a clerical tyranny.

People who only know modern Presbyterianism have no idea of the despotism
which the Fathers of the Kirk tried, for more than a century, to enforce.
The preachers sat in the seats of the Apostles; they had the gift of the
Keys, the power to bind and loose. Yet the Book of Discipline permits no
other ceremony, at the induction of these mystically gifted men, than
"the public approbation of the people, an